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Abstract
"Ark and Archive: Narrative Enclosures in Medieval and Early Modern Texts" investigates conceptual models of the archive in order to work toward a theory of archival poetics. It examines the desires and dangers that texts and iconography associate with archival endeavor, and investigates the methods, purposes, and problems of the codification of knowledge, the ordering of the past, and the narrative creation of new worlds. It is interested in the strategies of representation, and in the various possible relationships between the world and different records of it.
"The Ark of Memory," is the first of three chapter-length investigations of conceptually paradigmatic archives. Medieval chronicles and Middle English cycle drama figure Noah's ark as a vessel of divinely sanctioned remnants meant to recreate both past and future in the image of an ideal. By selecting what will be loaded into the ship, the patriarch records a specific vision of the antediluvian earth, constructing a narrative that deliberately forgets some things and remembers others, and licensing later historians to do the same. I explore how the fourteenth-century re-creation of Noah's Wile invites speculation about the incompleteness of this post-flood historical consciousness. I argue that her silencing and her eventual inclusion in the ark situates her at the inception of the dilemma of the woman writer: the narrator whose perspective either will be altered by patriarchal structures – by Noah's resources and controlled space – or else lost to a flood of oblivion.
My second chapter, "Arca Cordis," follows the arca into the human interior, where it becomes an ''ark of the heart," a phrase used in religious prose to refer to a site in which anatomical and spiritual conceptions of human interiority blend. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the heart is figured as an archive of personal devotion, turning to writers of religious prose who create the arca cordis as a paradoxically fleeting record of interior transformation. Descriptions of the arca cordis offer a way for thinking about the relationship between the idea of the self and the strategies of recording. Constructing a monument to religious belief within the heart and making that interior into a record of spiritual transformation demonstrates how the self might be understood to waver continually between idiosyncratic sinfulness and self-effacing rapture. I argue that it is the existence of this oscillating self that the arca cordis and texts about miraculous interiors endeavor to archive.
My final chapter, "Infernal Archive," approaches hell as a subterranean stronghold of problematic memory, and considers issues of archival access and temporal mediation. I examine the relationship that the dramatic tradition of the Harrowing of Hell forges between Old and New testaments and old and new traditions. I argue that features of symbolic performance space and the plays' dramaturgical use of the hell mouth encourage us to consider the past as infernally archived but poorly contained: a past that at any moment might seep out from the underground. I investigate the hierarchy of valuation the schema of salvation history moves medieval thinkers to impose upon notions of past and present, and consider issues such as the specter of interruption, the insistence of repetition, and the difficulty of narrative closure.
